


like nothing's broken

by pprfaith



Series: Soldier!AU [3]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Child Abuse, Cigarettes, Gen, M/M, Molestation, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-07
Updated: 2011-10-07
Packaged: 2017-10-24 09:43:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/262026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a year since Charles decided to save the world and nothing's really changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like nothing's broken

**Author's Note:**

> Never say I am not a fickle, easily swayed person. A few nice reviews and I’m back on the story. Unbetaed and I don’t really like it, but I don’t think it’s getting any better. All mistakes are mine. Sorry. It's late. Enjoy.

+

 **like nothing’s broken**

+

Erik was leaning outside the backdoor, staring at the sky and hiding the fact that he was smoking like a skittish sixteen-year-old. Only he’d never bothered to hide the fact that he was smoking when he actually had been sixteen. Or at any other point in his life.

It was a new experience that he’d slowly been getting used to over the past twelve months. The overall effect was that he a) knew more about the Xavier manor’s hidden corners by now than anyone, safe maybe Charles himself and b) he smoked a lot less.

He was not yet sure if that was a good thing or not. On the one hand, less tar in his lungs. Emma was rejoicing. On the other hand, smoking had been his lifeline since he’d come back from the war. Without it he felt like a newborn colt, wobbly and unsure. But, as always when Charles was involved, he couldn’t really help it and didn’t want to.

A little over a year after he’d met his sister’s boss, Erik had mostly gotten used to feeling off-kilter and liking it. Such was the effect of Charles Xavier, larger than life idealist and all around nice-guy.

Erik took a deep drag of his cigarette – inhale, exhale - and stared stonily out at dark hedges that were older than him, contrasting nicely with a candy blue sky. Picturesque and overwhelming, as so many things were these days. The house, for all that he’d gotten used to it while helping Charles with the renovations, still made him uncomfortable. It was too big, too opulent, too decadent. The grounds alone were dizzying, endless gardens patched together into one big whole. There was a rose garden that Raven had declared her project for the season. There was the maze that the kids liked to run around in and the greenhouses that had once contained orchids, according to Charles. All that glorious greenery made Erik’s eyes hurt and his mouth dry. It made him feel small and poor, like a boy he was, the boy who’d grown up in the city canyons of New York, down by the filth and the rats. The only green he’d known had been the one, sad tree in the corner of the dusty playground a block from the little apartment he’d lived in with his mother. So yes, he was intimidated by the vast gardens. The house itself was much, much worse than that still.

It was… beyond description. He had a room, up there, somewhere in the maze of corridors, next to Charles’s room. Charles had given it to him when he’d started spending the nights while overseeing the various work crews. He slept in it more than he slept at Emma’s these days, but it still didn’t feel like his. It felt like a guest room, like some temporary quarter.

Part of that was how refusal to just give in and move into the manor, he knew, but most of it was just the fact that the room was all wood paneling and golden lamps, oriental rugs and antique furniture. And the wallpaper. Erik had never, in all his years, seen wallpaper that ugly. It was dark green, with some sort of tiny, deep purple flowers printed on it and it made him feel claustrophobic within minutes of entering the room. He tried to keep the lights off whenever possible.

Hence him smoking out here, in the April cold, rather than in his own room, where he would have been just as hidden – better, probably – from the delicate eyes of Charles’s protégées. Charles had requested, kindly, that Erik stop chain smoking where the children would see right around the time the first pre-teen had arrived.

As adorable as little Jean was, Erik might not forgive her for that.

Next to him, the backdoor suddenly screeched. He made a mental note to oil it, half amused by the fact that he had somehow ended up the de-facto groundskeeper of Charles’s little haven of hope, and looked up to find Angel slipping outside. She was sixteen, as tall as a reedy, ten-year-old John, and all woman under her too tight clothes. She closed the door quietly and gave Erik a saucy little wave, her long, dark hair falling over one shoulder. Her expression was hot and smooth and her eyes were cold with terror. She flirted like she breathed, enough so to make Erik flee from her more than once, but she did it as a defense. Pre-emptive strike, if you will.

Erik had forbidden Charles from ever telling him her last name, lest he go out and find the man that had hurt her so badly. He didn’t want to go to jail for murder, even if it would be worth it to take the hunted look out of her eyes.

He simply raised an eyebrow at her attempt to flirt and her smile cranked up a notch. A quick glance at his watch told him she’d just finished her daily conversation with Charles. They left her almost as skittish as Erik had felt the first few times he’d gotten the full brunt of Charles’s attention.

“Can I bum one of those?” she asked, quickly gesturing toward his cigarette. She kept one arm crossed under her chest, nicely accentuating her breasts. Far too practiced in the sex game for a girl her age. She was supposed to fumble behind the bleachers, not be… this.

The second eyebrow joined the first. “No,” he said, shortly.

He didn’t really understand why the kids couldn’t see him smoke – they certainly smelled it and knew anyway – but he wasn’t going to enable babies like Angel to ruin their lungs. He’d started smoking at thirteen and almost slapped Emma silly when he’d caught her doing the same thing at fifteen.

“Please?” she drew out the word, fluttered her lashes, angled her body toward him in clear invitation. If she’d been five years older and a bit less screwed in the head, he still would have turned her down.

“Stop flirting with me,” he ground out instead of refusing her request again. She reared back, eyes too wide. Scared of him. Most of the kids were. It was getting better but Angel… it wasn’t him she was afraid of, technically. It was his gender and his height, his ability to force her into anything if he so chose. The other rugrats were getting used to him, slowly, tentatively, learning that he wasn’t really going to eat them, like Sean had threatened one day. Last week, Jean had followed him around for a whole days for some sort of ‘school project’. But Angel’s fears had nothing at all to do with _who_ Erik was, only with the _what_.

“Scared, big boy?” she drawled as soon as she caught herself, leaning in even further, trying even harder. As if, if she pretended she wanted it, she could make whatever she was afraid of go away.

He sighed, rubbed a hand over his forehead. Inhale. Exhale. _This_ was why he hadn’t wanted to be involved in Charles’s world saving scheme. He had no delicacy for things like this. So he simply changed the subject and hoped that she’d back off. “How was your meeting with Charles?”

She shuffled on her feet and looked away, the sex gone from her body abruptly. Thank god for that. Erik knew that the girl had spent her first week at the manor driving Charles up the wall during their sessions. She’d flirted with him, far harder than she’d ever flirted with Erik, because she’d felt cornered, Charles had said. From what little Charles had shared, she’d gone so far as to blatantly _offer_ what she thought he’d want. Beyond that, all he told Erik these days was that she was slowly opening up. He took his ‘patients’’ privacy very seriously. Erik wondered, sometimes, if he told Emma about the conversations the two of them had late at night, when neither could sleep, or if he kept those close to his chest, too.

Better not to wonder too hard. Charles never gave the impression that he was trying to analyze Erik, but Erik knew better than to assume the other man could just switch off everything he knew.

Beside him, Angel suddenly plopped herself against the wall, a safe six feet away, on the other side a convenient window, and huffed a long breath. “He’s so weird,” she burst out and then looked at Erik out of the corner of her eye. When he did nothing but raise his eyebrow at her yet again, she added, “You know, the Prof.”

Another fun fact about life at the manor: Somehow, the kids – led by Raven, Erik suspected – had started giving everyone nicknames. Sean was Banshee because he screamed so much. Raven was Mystique for reasons Erik didn’t quite understand. Charles had been saddled with the apt title of Professor, something that made him preen and cringe in equal measure. If they had a nickname for Erik, they hadn’t yet worked up the courage to tell him, although Jean had giggled something about ‘metal man’ the week before.

Lost in thought, he was silent too long, making Angel second guess him again. Her body was tensing, as if she was sure he was going to throw himself on top of her any moment. He pointedly busied himself with his smoke, watching her settle a bit through his lashes. A month ago, she would have run at this point, or fallen back into flirting to get out of the conversation. Erik guessed this was the progress Charles had been talking about. Her head, at least, seemed to be catching on to the fact that she was safe. Progress, yes, but it was slow and painful and fragile and Erik felt, like he did so often, that one wrong step would break it, shatter it into a thousand pieces.

Erik wasn’t made for delicate. Erik was made for jackboots and assault rifles. He was a blunt instrument of war. Not… whatever it was this girl needed him to be.

The young ones were easier, less traumatized, less jaded. They laughed and still had a child’s capacity to trust again, even after being badly hurt. Angel didn’t have that anymore. Too old, too pretty.

She took a deep breath, eyed the door to her right and stayed where she was. Kept talking. “He keeps, like, saying that stuff about being my friend and just wanting to talk, you know. About how I can tell him about shi- stuff and how he’s not gonna judge or anything. That he just wants to help me get over… get over it.”

Erik rolled his head along the wall to look at her. “What’s weird about that?” he asked.

She shrugged and watched carefully as he reached out to snuff out the butt of his cigarette in the saucer resting on the windowsill between them. He dropped his hand to his side and she followed the movement for a second, hypnotized.

“He can’t actually _mean_ that shit. Everyone says stuff like that, but no-one ever _means_ it,” she finally declared. She tried to sound sure, but there was something like a question in her voice.

“Charles does.” When she just looked at him, he shrugged and explained in the only measure he had. Violence. “He’d wage a war for every single one of you kids.”

She stomped one tiny foot in the grass, huffed again. “ _Why_?”

It was possibly the first, unguarded thing she’d ever done around him. He smiled, crookedly, and pushed away from the wall.

“Because he’s a good man,” he said with all the conviction he could muster, quiet and steady. Like it was absolute truth. Like it was fact. Hell, it _was_ fact. The sky was blue and Charles was a good man.

He brushed past her, back inside, and felt almost absurdly proud when he noticed that she didn’t jump out of her skin as their arms briefly touched.

+

Charles found Erik an hour later, fiddling with some faulty wiring in the library. He could have done it tomorrow or even left it for one of the contractors that were still in and out of the house regularly, but he felt like doing something. Well, something other than being an awkward, emotionally stunted wreck around children that deserved better.

Charles sunk into one of the old, overstuffed chairs close by and leaned back, eyes closed. He looked worn, but happy. He usually did. Erik never understood why. “Angel just burst into my study to ask me if I’d really wage a war for her,” he said after a moment of silence.

Erik flipped his screwdriver once in his hands and didn’t react at all.

“She said you told her I would.”

Over his shoulder, Erik asked, “Wouldn’t you?”

The answer came promptly and without hesitation, like Erik had known it would. Charles was many things. Unpredictable was not one of them. “Of course,” he said, and meant it.

“Then where’s the problem?” He finally found what was causing the flickering lights in this corner of the room. Something had half-bitten through the wires. Mice probably. It was always mice. He’d need to replace the whole section of wiring, or maybe let someone else do it. With a sigh, he tucked the mess he’d made of the wiring back into its place and stood. There went his distraction.

He stretched the kinks out of his back while Charles explained, “It’s not good for her, Erik, to focus so much on one person. There’s always the danger of a patient fixating on their therapist, doubly so with her, due to her situation, and you’re encouraging her. She shouldn’t put so much faith in just me. There’s a balance…”

“I’ve been in her place,” Erik suddenly interrupted, rudely. He didn’t want to hear the entire lecture on text book psychology on sexually abused teenagers.

Charles straightened in his chair, eyes open again, looking alarmed. Erik rewound their conversation in his mind, found what had his friend so alarmed.

“Unable to trust anyone,” he clarified. Charles almost visibly deflated as his sudden fears for Erik’s past were laid to rest. He already knew the worst of it and there were no more skeletons in Erik’s closet. None that mattered, anyway.

“Let her have this, Charles,” he added. “She needs to start somewhere. Be her anchor. She’ll figure the rest out as she goes along.”

“Why me?” he asked, curiosity in his voice. Erik walked over to him, slumped into the second armchair, legs stretched long in front of him. He tried to keep his dirty hands away from the leather, even as he knew Charles wouldn’t care.

Crossing his feet at the ankles, he gave the other a roguish grin that he mostly meant, too. “You’re a good person to trust, Charles.”

The best, possibly. Because Erik hadn’t been lying. Charles truly was a good man. He was kind, caring, open, willing to move heaven and earth for almost anyone, stranger or friend. He _tried_ where everyone else had long since given up and somehow his annoying optimism kept rubbing off on people, making them _better_.

Maing _Erik_ better, so much better than he’d been before Charles Xavier had offered him a light in the dark, literally and figuratively.

Charles smiled at that, widely and openly and god, it was like the sun going up and a dozen other clichés Erik couldn’t think of off the top of his head. He looked away, unwilling to be blinded, and when he looked back, Charles was standing at his knees, looking down at him. Still going supernova.

“Do you trust me, Erik?” he asked, coyly, almost shyly.

“Flirting again?” Erik teased, because it was better than being serious and ‘flirting’ had long since become a game, an inside joke.

Charles cocked his head, pressing his lips together briefly in denial. “No. I haven’t been flirting for months. And I think you know that.”

Did he? Probably. It hadn’t really been ‘flirting’ in a long time. They had been dancing around this for almost half a year, ever since the first time they’d kissed, if you could call it that. It had been a brief, casual kiss, barely more than a press of lips. Charles had come bouncing up to Erik, the approved paperwork making him a foster parent clutched in one hand, exuberance written all over him. They’d hugged and Charles had stretched up long enough for that one, quick kiss, before throwing himself on Raven and squeezing the stuffing out of her.

It had taken Erik weeks to realize that Charles had probably meant for Erik to pick up the ball. The second move had been his, but he never made it.

There had been more kisses since then. One or two drunken ones. One New Year’s kiss that almost qualified as what Charles called ‘snogging’. Quick pecks in the heat of the moment. It was all very Victorian and every single time Charles was the one who initiated and Erik the one who withdrew, who made his apologies and fled back into the anonymity of the city, back to Emma’s guestroom, which wasn’t home anymore than the opulent room upstairs was. Away from Charles, who made Erik feel entirely too off kilter.

He never started it, but he didn’t stop it either. Sometimes, when Charles was as close as he was right now, Erik _wanted_ with a fierceness that frightened him because it was all too familiar. It was the same hunger he’d felt for murdering the man that had killed his mother. The same burning desire for safety, for survival, that had been his constant companion in the warzone. It was the kind of want that always ended in violence and destruction. In ruin.

Erik didn’t want to ruin Charles Xavier.

One of his hands rose, almost unbidden, to cup Charles’s face sweetly. Softly. Entirely unlike him. He was leaving smudges of dust on Charles’s skin. Metaphor.

“You know I trust you,” he said, ignoring the way Charles leaned into his palm like a content cat.

“Then why do you keep running away?”

Erik dropped his hand with a sigh and fought the urge to rub at the bridge of his nose. That never helped. “I have no intention of ruining what you’ve built here, Charles.”

“We, Erik,” Charles corrected, frustration tingeing his voice. “We. You are as much part of this as I am.”

Erik snorted, as he always did when it came down to this. Charles insisting that Erik was a vital part of what was going on, Erik pointing out that Charles had the idea, the money, the place, the degree. Erik, much like Raven and her friends, just got pulled along in the wake of Charles’s enthusiasm.

Erik was part of this the way the dancing leaf is part of the storm: Moved along through forces of nature, unable to resist.

“I’m broken,” Erik tried instead, because that, at least, Charles would have to acknowledge. There were better people – so many – for Charles to take up with than a cantankerous, old soldier.

Charles, to his surprise, bent closer, cupping Erik’s face in a reversal of their earlier positions. “Yes,” he agreed, easily, like he was commenting on the weather.

Anger welled up in Erik, along with fondness. They two emotions warred in him and, as they always did, both lost, sinking back into darkness. He just kept staring at Charles, the way he had for the past year, paralyzed and willing and not nearly as afraid as he should have been. Charles made everything seem so very easy.

“But, my friend,” Charles went on. “You forget that I have never known you whole.” He smiled and it was soft and unbreakable. “I don’t suspect many people have. I don’t know what you might have been like. I only know you as you are and I like this you.”

“Warts and all?” Erik tried to joke. It fell flat, heavy with the weight of everything he wasn’t saying.

Charles bit his lip. “No. Absolutely no warts. But I’ll take the scars.”

There it was. Out in the open, everything Erik had intentionally not heard over the past year: Charles wanted him, ugly, broken, and useless. He wanted Erik as Erik was and he didn’t care what it would cost him, how it would drag him down.

It was everything Erik wanted, served on a silver platter. It was too good to be true and yes, that was another hang-up he owed to the foster system: If something seemed too good to be true it usually was and thus was going to get taken away again within minutes. He didn’t want Charles to get taken away.

“What do you even want from me?” he blurted eventually, because all this thinking was making his head hurt and his fingers itch. He craved a cigarette like he craved air. He needed peace. Calm. Sanity. Inhale. Exhale. Charles was a good substitute usually, but not tonight. Tonight, he made everything worse.

Charles didn’t even hesitate in answering. “I want you to kiss me,” he rattled off, “I want you to stop putting yourself down. I want you to stop running away. I want you to rip off the horrible wallpaper in your room and replace it with something you actually, bloody like before you go blind. I want _you_.”

Erik stared. He stared like an idiot, eyes wide, speechless, silent. He should have known, by now, that Charles had an answer for everything, that he never backed down, no matter how much of Erik’s ugliness showed. And yet he was surprised. How could Charles seriously want… this? _Him_? How could anyone? Didn’t he understand what he was getting himself into? What Erik was?

He had no idea what to say, what to do, how to make Charles _see_. He never did. Charles always saw the best in everyone, even if it wasn’t there. He settled on the easiest part. The _only_ easy part. “The wallpaper?”

With an air of helplessness, Charles started giggling like the school girl he sometimes reminded Erik of in his blind naiveté. “Of course you’d get hung up on the bloody wallpaper,” he observed, taking a step back, breaking contact.

Erik was grateful. And disappointed. Goddamn. Inhale. Exhale. Keep moving. “What does the wallpaper have to do with anything?”

Rubbing his temples like he was staving off a headache, Charles shook his head. “Your room, Erik. It’s been yours for almost a year and it has less personality than Angel’s, even though she’s only been here for a few weeks. _That’s_ what the wallpaper has to do with anything.”

“Maybe I like the wallpaper,” Erik said, defensively.

Charles didn’t even blink. “Liar.”

Alright, so he hated the wallpaper. And the wood paneling. And the furniture. But still, “I don’t see the point in – “

“The point is that you’re alive! You’re breathing and your heart is beating and you _survived_ , Erik. You made it out. So _live_!”

Silence. It rang surprisingly loudly in a room insulated by thousands of books. Erik closed his eyes, tipped his head backwards until it hit the wooden edge of the armchair painfully. “Fucking telepath,” he muttered sarcastically, no heat in his voice.

He sounded more tired than he could ever remember being. Not even when he’d woken in a field hospital and found out that he was the only survivor of his unit had he felt this _old_. Charles just had to get right down to the root of it and pull, didn’t he?

“I take it back,” Charles said eventually, sounding frustrated more than anything but still so impossibly gentle. “Don’t trust me.”

He turned and padded toward the door on quiet feet, the rug swallowing any noise. He stopped, doorknob in hand, looked back over his shoulder. “Trust _yourself_.”

+

Eventually, the door opened again and Erik found himself looking, even though he knew it wouldn’t be Charles. Charles had made his point and he liked his dramatics too much to ruin an exit like that with coming back.

Still. Hope flared and died and Angel stood in the doorway, looking uncomfortable. She shifted from one foot to the other for a long moment before asking, “Did you… um… fight? With the Prof? Because he’s… pouting.”

The disbelief was stark in her voice and Erik almost laughed because to the kids, Charles was some sort of godking, some untouchable creature. Finding out he got into spats and then sulked afterwards was probably a shock to their collective system. The idea was almost enough to make Erik smile. Almost. Hopefully he hadn’t crawled into his scotch where the kids could see.

Angel took his silence as an answer and took another step forward. She was playing with the hem of her shirt in a nervous gesture Erik had never seen before. Or rather, he thought, she hadn’t allowed herself the weakness before. He hated himself a bit for going gooey over the tiny show of trust. “He said that I shouldn’t… that I shouldn’t trust him. He said I should ‘trust myself’. And then he said that you were a ‘bloody, stubborn pillock’.”

Apparently, Charles had not hidden himself safely away before getting into the scotch. Angel frowned for a long moment and then added. “I have no idea what the hell that’s supposed to mean.”

And she’d come to Erik for clarification? He stood abruptly, running both hands through his hair in frustration because, good lord, somewhere along the line these kids had stopped being afraid of him and started _coming to him with their troubles_. In hindsight, Angel probably hadn’t stumbled across him by accident earlier. She tended to hole up in the unused parts of the attic when she was upset. What the fuck was he supposed to do with that?

He laughed, and it sounded choked. “I have no idea,” he admitted because he didn’t have it in him to lie. “Absolutely no idea.” Then he looked at the teenager in front of him and added, wryly, “I think it involves wallpaper, though.”

Inhale. Exhale. Maybe Charles was right. Scratch that, he usually was, infuriating asshole that he was. Erik laughed to himself, shook his head.

Angel watched him, her face stuck somewhere between horrified and amused. “Are you drunk?” she asked, incredulously.

He laughed again because it was better than sobbing and waved her off.

Wallpaper. Trust yourself. He probably couldn’t manage the second, but the first…Maybe he was tired of being tired, of the endless _inhale, exhale_ that only ever helped until the next moment.

After a minute’s consideration, he spun on his heel to reach for the toolbox he’d left sitting on the floor and dug around in it for a bit. He knew there were… ah, there. He pulled out two paint-stained, metal spatulas and weighed them in his palms. Then he looked at Angel speculatively, back at the spatulas, back at her. He held one of them out, grip first, for her to take.

“How do you feel about therapeutic violence perpetuated on ugly wallpaper?” he asked.

For a very long minute he stood there, spatula held out like an idiot, and thought she would run away. She’d have been right to, since he was behaving like a lunatic and that was not what she needed. But then she reached out, took the offered tool and hefted it with surprising determination. She gave him a single nod and a small smile.

Wallpaper. He could do wallpaper.

+

+


End file.
